Mexico City 2026

An inspired comment by Liz in early August lead to our third trip to Mexico City in early September and let me tell you, it was one for the books! And by books, I of course mean “a long blog post.”

SEPTEMBER 3: Up rather early for our flight, Liz catches me up on her new favorite book over a South Carolina layover breakfast.

At the airport there were rocking chairs and a lot of places selling pickle juice shots. Tempted? Yes!

We took to the air and then a few hours later I see the sight I’ve loved to see for a touch more than 30 years to the day.

It had been nearly 3 years since our last trip! The airport has been fixed up a little bit. Waited for a while for our luggage, made friends with a missionary headed to the CCM, and then before too long we were in our uber headed to our hotel.

For the first time in a long time we got a hotel instead of an Airbnb and let me tell you, the Hotel Stanza in Roma Norte completely met our needs. Affordable, clean, comfortable, and very well located in relation to our taco priorities, really I couldn't recommend it more. And right next to Pushkin Garden! Look at that nice view!

After checking in and taking our bags up to our room we headed right out to get to eating! I will note now that our hotel was on Avendia Alvaro Obregon, a major yet lovely thoroughfare cutting through Roma and, as major thoroughfares often do, it had many good and important places along it. Right across the avenue from our hotel? An El Moro! But we’ll get to that later.

Also across the avenue from our hotel? Asaderos Orozco, and we’ll get to that right now!

Asaderos Orozco is a very recently opened, very popular taqueria specializing in carne asada run by the same folks that run the very popular marisqueria Mi Compa Chava, which I have never been to, but understand to be a big deal. As we pulled up in the late early afternoon, or early middle afternoon, the restaurant was full but the wait for a table not terribly long…maybe 15 or 20 minutes? Which is a decent little bit of time, fortunately we had kitty cams to check and a cat to observe.

Once seated, we found AO to be an absolute party, the sort of place you’d want to come to with a gang of friends. As I had multiple stops planned ahead for the afternoon and AO was technically our appetizer meal, Liz and I went fairly light, ordering a carne asada taco a piece and splitting a vampiro. To our delight, we were welcomed to the table with a complimentary serving of beefy beans and a large, fresh flour tortilla to eat it up with. Delightful! (like I said). We found the carne asada offerings of AO to be very nice and I was particularly impressed by the depth of offerings at their salsa bar, but I present you with non-salsa’d tacos here.

We made our way further along Alvaro Obregon visiting a Pendulum Bookshop that didn’t have a pendulum and passing Taqueria Alvaro Obregon, which I had heard was a good classic taqueria that had been around for a while, but we didn’t get to it on this trip.

But what we did get to? Good ‘ol Orinoco for our first official meal of the trip. In the 7 years I’ve known it, Orinoco has gotten very popular and I feel, from my skewed perspective, really kicked off the avalanche of new-style taquerias that owe something to its style (a taco historian can surely and should definitely correct me that the new-style taqueria avalanche was kicked off by somebody else at some other time). With this naturally comes backlash and think pieces, but as for me and my house, we will continue loving Orinoco. It’s good! If you’ve never been, you ought to. And if you’ve been enough, it’s okay to go somewhere else! It is conceivable I’ll go on a Mexico City trip someday where I don’t go to Orinoco, but such a decision shall never be made as a gesture of “I’m over that place” just “I’ve got places to eat!” With plenty of eating still to do, we split a campechano especial and the Jamaica drink. Oh and it turns out we ate right by where Harry Styles had eaten when he visited this particular Orinoco.

Post-Orinoco we walked down to the much lauded, much posted, much praised Tacos del Valle and found the line to be just too much for us. Perhaps we’d be back another time. So we walked up to Calle Colima, which is not a thoroughfare, but is one of Roma’s key streets. I grabbed a campechano taco a piece from Taqueria La 89. Liz found it to be too spicy, so I got to have 2 campechanos. La 89 had caught my eye on Instagram and I believe they’re Michelin Guide-listed (dang you will find so many taquerias showing off their Michelin-listing now) yet the tacos did not make a strong impression on me.

On three previous trips I had tried to try out Jenni’s Quesadillas and always found it not to be found at its corner. BUT on this trip Jenni’s was up and running and I got a quesadilla. And…it was definitely a quesadilla! I wouldn’t say particularly better than other street quesadillas that I’ve had, but still good, and congratulations to Jenni’s for being famous and popular.

Remember how I said Hotel Stanza was perfectly located? It’s so perfectly located that it’s two block down the street from Jenni’s around around the corner. Liz and I made our way back to our room for a much needed and deserved recharge nap and then we watched an extremely impressive lightning storm from our room, featuring on especially loud thunderclap that sounded like the earth was splitting in two. Earth survived, though!

Rested and the rains receding, my bride of three and a half years made our way towards Taqueria Gabriel for dinner, passing through Roma, the Zona Rosa, and crossing Reforma along the way.

We tried Gabriel with Mom and Dad on our last trip to Mexico and it made a very strong impression, so we decided to dedicate a whole evening’s worth of eating to it. I believe I deemed their cochinita taco my Bite of the Day on instagram that day? Gabriel has a deep menu of of great tacos, I really do recommend it. We found the restaurant to be a little sleepy that Thursday night, the heavy rains having definitely cut into the mood and the number of patrons, and my overall impression of Gabriel visit #2 has a sleepy feeling to it…really I like it but I can see us not sprinting back for visit #3 next time I’m in town. OR maybe we should go right back and throw our whole hearts into it and have the best meal on earth there? It could conceivably happen!

Back across Reforma, back through Zona Rosa and Roma, back to Hotel Stanza, what a brilliant half day in Mexico City! OH WAIT! Before going back to the Hotel? A visit to El Moro, of course. For Churros and a milkshake. Dang. El Moro will really make you quite the milkshake.

SEPTEMBER 4: Ok, our first full day back in Mexico City, time to Get Serious about this trip! We get up and walk the short but scenic walk over to the Rosetta Bakery (passing the open early morning doors of Rosetta Restaurant along the way) and find a 15 or 20 minute wait for a table.

I spent the wait walking up to Rio de Janeiro park while trying to get Terminix on the phone. They needed our credit card number before they would get the raccoon out of our attic. And then it was time to speed walk back to Rosetta!

Breakfast at Rosetta never misses! Especially if you get a ham sandwich (wow!) because they’re out of quiche. But you may have to ask them about your hot chocolates 3 times before they bring them out in to go cups at the end of your meal. Also: If you want to eat at Rosetta, you really need to be there by 8am, 8:30 at the latest, or you will be waiting and waiting. (See photo of waiters below).

Next: A bit of a battle to get an Uber (Tip I’ll give myself: Don’t try to get an uber on Calle Colima, walk down to Av Obregon or over to Insurgentes, it’s quicker than waiting for a driver willing to wind through less speedy roads) but we get an Uber and I have it to take us Vasco de Quiroga at the edge of Santa Fe for an absolute tourist experience.

Ok, so what was the tourist experience? Well, Mexico City now has 3 “Cable Bus” routes — a Cable Bus being a commuter skyway/gondola thing crossing above the city. From Vasco de Quiroga one can ride a Cable Bus across a 6 station, 21 minute journey to to Chapultepec Park. Of course, the park was a lot closer to Roma than Santa Fe, but I wanted to try the cable bus and you know what? It was worth it! And fun! Smooth, quiet and peaceful, my dear Mexicans, I apologize for making your commute part of my vacation but I really liked it. Among the spots spotted during the ride? Hospital ABC, where the first osteosarcoma of young Elder Barnes was first spotted back in 1997 (see photo 6 for a zoomed in photo of it).

We disembarked and made our way into and through the park to pay a visit to our friend Xin Xin.

Xin Xin is a 36 year old panda at the Chapultepec Zoo. She is the last of the Mexican pandas. Some of her predecessors are on display elsewhere in the zoo. We found her to be napping upon arrival, but we stuck around a bit and she woke up, walked around a bit, and walked back into her hiding place. We love you Xin Xin, great to see you again! (Also, on the way to Xin Xin we found many of the other animals to be out, but not necessarily awake. HOWEVER we saw an awake tiger bug a sleeping tiger, and that was just as fun as watching Xin Xin wake up to waddle around).

From there, across the park we walked to the Anthropology Museum for Liz’s first visit ever and my first visit in 9 years.

The Anthropology Museum is truly an exhaustingly inexhaustible collection of priceless treasures worth visiting for as long as you can stand all the wonders.

Outside the museum the Voladors were volando so we stayed to watch the wild ritual.

And from there we hiked through the park to Condesa for a few lunches.
A prologue to the first stop: Before our trip I had read this great book about the relationship between Mexico and pigs and all the different ways to eat pigs in Mexico. The book taught me of a preparation I had never heard of before, “castacan”, which is a whole deep fried pork belly that is then chopped into pieces. Sounded like my kind of food! So I did a little research into where I might be able to get some castacan in Mexico City and, well, turns out there’s a pink palace to yucatecan pork preparations called Castacan on the edge of Roma/Condesa and there we found ourselves eating lunch number 1 of September 4th. Liz and I both had wonderful penuchos de cochinita pibil and I had a castacan taco that rocked my socks. Absolutely loved Castacan. Absolutely loved the ambience. Had we 12 more hours in Mexico City, good chance I would’ve had another Castacan meal.

From there we headed deeper into Condesa towards an absolute tragedy: Turns out our beloved (I mean, everyone’s beloved) Don Juan’s doesn’t serve their milanesa tacos on weekends, and Friday is part of the weekend. Only carnitas! And they’re probably great carnitas (in fact…I believe I had one in 2019?) but we kept it moving on to our next stop. Sorry, Liz. So, so sorry. But the next stop was quite the place: the popular and famous and well reviewed Maizajo, a taco bar where you wait a while for a spot and then stand and order delicious taco treat after delicious taco treat. We really went to town here, ordering, if I remember right: 2 or 3 campechano tacos, 2 chicken Milanesa tacos, a potato flauta, a tuna tostada (because over Contramar every fancy place needs a tuna tostada and I don’t hold it against them), and probably more stuff. This place is what my British colleagues would call “mega.” If you like to party, it’s worth the line.

From there we made our way back to Stanza. Although Roma and Condesa are right by each other on the map, and in our minds, and our hearts, some parts of Condesa are actually a pretty long walk to Roma. So it was a bit of a long walk! It’s nice to walk, though.

We ate so well that afternoon that we woke up from our naps feeling like we had eaten enough for the day and just took a nice nigh time Roma walk (I was tempted for a moment to try some Mexican street Thai but the notion of waiting for a spot was all it took to send me on my way away.) Also Liz helped me decide to buy a new hat! Maybe you will see it later in this post. Oh! and we also passed by a taqueria called Cariñito which had previously had my curiosity and it was such a circus that any notion of curiosity left me swiftly.

SEPTEMBER 5 Rising early as I do, I take a little stroll about Pushkin Garden and our Roma neighborhood and submit these few pieces of evidence that I did it.

And then, only a little later, into a rideshare we go for a ride to the west side of Polanco for our breakfast.

We breakfasted at a geographically convenient to our next plans sucursal of Casa de Toño, which is a chain we could have visited in many other neighborhoods across the city. Let me plant a flag in the ground here. For us vacationers in Mexico City, La Casa de Toño is like the ultimate IYKYK destination. You could call it a Mexican Denny’s and not be super off the mark, but oh, this is no VIPS or Sanbournes, this is something so much better. Basically an incredible always open place always cranking out the essentials of the Mexican table. Want a real nice pozole? This is the place. Want a bunch of crispy taquitos? This is the place. Surprisingly large sopes? Come here! A plate of molletes? Here! (Ok those are the things we got here). Enchiladas? They got them. Tacos? Yes. Chilaquiles? Of course. And it goes on and on and everything we had there, how should I say it, slapped? Casa de Toño doesn’t miss! It’s not a flashy destination, I don’t know how Instagrammable it is, but boy, you’ll like it. I mean, boy, we liked it!

My interest for that morning was taking a big Polanco walk, because I am always interested in seeing more of Polanco. And this morning we saw lots of Polanco, but as usual, I want to see MORE Polanco! First stop: fancy grocery store. And then we walked by the Iglesia San Ignacio Loyola, which I’d walked by numerous times before, but THIS time we went inside. And it was as cool on the inside as it was on the outside!

From there we meander down to Parque Lincoln where I heard they had a Saturday tianguis and, when a park is big, it’s funny how hard it can be to find its weekly tianguis but eventually we found it, we walked through all of it, and Liz got some nail clippers.

From there we walked north through Polanco and visited Xinu, a perfume store that, frankly, makes Le Labo look like Walgreens.

More Polanco. Saw this Legend of Zelda looking church (Parroquia San Augustin, it turns out) and passed through the Polanco metro station hoping to try out their piano stairs but I couldn’t figure out where the piano stairs were. Then we had a little first lunch of the day at El Rey de Suadero because we are a suadero family, then walked over the edge of Polanco into the Camino Real hotel, just one of those Mexico City spots Liz and I like to pop into, and then had a second lunch at Taqueria Selene because I’m an al pastor boy.

Then we went across Reforma to one of the great surprises of the trip, Tacos Domingo, a big, well-branded shiny new construction taqueria from the publishers of one of my favorite taco coffee table books that anchors a new, I don’t know? Hotel or office building along the busiest business street in town. I went because I liked their book and wanted to give their tacos a shot/see what was up with their tacos. But surprise surprise (as I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph) Tacos Domingo was GREAT! You sit down and they hook you up with the complementary salsa and meaty beans and then Liz ordered a couple carne asada tacos and I got their great big Arabian taco and also we had guacamole and we were in heaven. It was so fun and good in there and with a little ask they gave us a stack of stickers of their sun logo. We just had to buy their latest Taco magazine. I’ll note that Tacos Domingo has an outpost in NYC now with a much smaller footprint and a much smaller menu but, yeah, we will be trying it on our next trip. Big big recommend on Tacos Domingo for all of you. You will eat super well and have a super good time.

From there we walked to Utilitario Mexicano to get some more enameled plates and bowls, passing by things I had heard of before and things I hadn’t seen before. Taqueria La Estrella, you look cool, be open some time!

Then we walked back to Stanza for our nap…and wow, that was quite a walk, heading all the way from west Polanco to our hotel on foot. Post nap we ubered over to Nico’s for our first visit ever to the famous Mexico City restaurant, Nico’s. This is what I knew about Nico’s going in: It was famous and famously understated and located in an out of the way part of the city with not much there besides Nico’s itself. And, wow, I cannot overstate how understated Nicos is inside or how out of the way it feels. Nico’s looks kinda like an unpopular and underdecorated sports bar on the inside…I had expected a very bare bones Cardenal or something. Nope, an empty grey room with big tvs. Anyway, starting the day at Casa de Toño and ending with Nico’s was a great way to start and end our day as both specialize in the food that makes Mexico special. It’s hard to exactly put into words the, uhh, understated next-level nature of the food at Nico’s. It’s all very traditional Mexican food, nothing stands out on the menu as especially special or enticing, you just order a “standard” Mexican dish and then you get it and take a bite and go “dang. they really did it.” I don’t know what else I can tell you about it because I long gave up on being a paid food writer. After their complementary esquites and tostadas and salsa we had a caesar salad which they prepared table side — right down to mashing together the dressing ingredients while we watched, the absolutely wild sopa seca de natas which is like a crepe and cream lasagna AND was my Bite of the Day, Liz got a milanesa and I got chicken mole. A grand meal. And then we got an uber ride back to Stanza from a talkative fellow who had lived in Arizona most of his life.

SEPTEMBER 6: Still feeling well fed from Saturday, we got up and got to it and caught a bus towards the famous Vasconcelos Library. Liz spent some of the bus ride in the exclusively ladies area. She enjoyed that pink seat. I found Vasconcelos to be as cool as ever and Liz was appropriately wowed. Great start to a Sunday! And that copy of Twilight? I saw it on my first visit with Mom in 2017!

From there we walked a bit over to the Santa Maria Ribera neighborhood to get some church. And oops, it was stake conference and there was no church. I really, really think I had double checked that there was actually church there that Sunday. Guess I should’ve triple checked. And honestly I was plenty bummed, being my 30th anniversary of arriving there as a missionary, I was in the mood for a mighty dose of Mexican church. Oh well. We got to see the famous Santa Maria Ribera kiosk, that was pretty cool, and then we ubered into el Centro, which was shutting down street by street for the September 15th celebration coming up in 9 days.

I presented Liz with a few Centro lunch options, new and old, and, in a moment of pure lunacy, said “I don’t think I necessarily need to go to Los Cocoyus on this trip.” Fortunately Liz was not possessed with such madness and voted Cocuyos. And dang. I’ve probably said it before, but I’ll say it again and again and again, their campechano (we are not just a suadero family, we are a suadero and longaniza family) is an absolute all-timer. Really one of the tacos to beat in the whole dang giant city. Viva Cocuyos! Cocuyos forever and ever! And I will never ever say that I’m thinking that I don’t necessarily need Cocuyos ever again.

From Cocuyos we took a nice Centro walk, popping into a Pasteleria Ideal, a Palacio de Hierro, a visit to El Zocalo and environs, and then made our way over to the Palacio de Bellas Artes where there was a lowrider/California culture gathering of some sort happening.

Then we got on a bus (again! we love the bus!) and took it way down to Navarte. On our last trip we were enjoying tacos from El Vilsito and this nearby place Tacos Tony looked like it might be awful good. So we went back to find out. And it was good! Had a couple very nice campechanos and, well, I liked it plenty but I feel a little sour that 2 tacos and 2 waters was ten bucks. That was a little out of hand. And then we went over to Vilsito (which is basically next door) and they were like “we’ll be ready in 30 minutes” and we were like “next time, then.” But here’s a proposition: Next time you’re in Mexico City, go have a night time al pastor party at El Vilsito when they’ve got all the trompos blazing and then grab a few campechanos or suaderos or whatever you might like from Tacos Tony and you’ll have yourself a real nice late night taco night.

Then we started a nice long walk back up to our Hotel Stanza and…

Made a little stop at Dino Quesadillas … both Liz and I had been instagram targeted by Dino Quesadilla content and, well, it was awesome. You pick a few dinosaur shapes and fillings and then they hand mold you these cheese stuffed masa dinosaurs. It was fun and good! AND I’d say our server at Dino Quesadillas was one of the absolute most considerate and attentive we had that whole week and this is in a city of extremely considerate and attentive service just left and right. I mean I can’t think of a single instance where we weren’t being served with attentiveness and kindness EXCEPT for Utilitario Mexicano, they’ve got some real disinterested hipsters working there, as they should.

We walked the rest of the way to the hotel and took a late afternoon nap. Then rain started. Our first real evening rain of the trip. I thought this rain might scare away the Tacos del Valle line. Nope! They have that figured out. Stood in their indoor line for a minute and then skedaddled. If I want to stand in a line I’ll go to New York! Del Valle is probably great. Perhaps someday we’ll know. But for now, we are not waiting in that line.

Let me set the stage for our final taco meal: Sometime soon after our 2023 Mexico trip, Instagram made me aware of Tacos Atarantados. Seemed to me it was aping Orinoco, but with the color green. Still it was on my radar. And in my preparations for our trip, I discovered there was an Atarantados (like everything, apparently) within blocks of the Stanza hotel. I put it on the To Eat list, but with no strong priority. Again, to me it was just Green Orinoco, we had a pretty full taco agenda to get to, this was no strong priority, but it was a curiosity. Knowing it was one of the taquerias open extremely late (like Orinoco is), I’d go to bed each Mexico night wondering if maybe I’d wake up around 2 and go have a middle of the night Atarantados bite. Easier thought than done! Anyway, with del Valle off the menu, we walk over to Atarantados and, Surprise! Boy are we glad we did because it turned out to be possibly our top taco meal of the trip? WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED that Green Orinoco would be so great? First of all, I should stop calling it Green Orinoco because, in spite of aesthetic similarities, they’re really fairly different places. Atarantados was buzzing with a very real taqueria energy, like a “this is a place where you come to eat your tacos energy.” I’m being redundant, I’m being not clear. You just have to have experienced very real taqueria energy before to know what I mean, or go to Atarantados to feel it. Now I’m being a snob. Let’s move on. Atarantados has 4 types of trompo and I ordered their sampler of trompo rojo (notice they call what we’d call al pastor tromp rojo and in my research I’ve found that they say it’s not actually al pastor, it’s a different marinade, so it’s not al pastor at all, it’s rojo), trompo negro, trompo de chicharron and trompo de res. A magnificent sample of the delicacies they offer! All hit, big time. Liz, on a whim of inspiration, ordered the ribeye w/ cheese taco, which very quickly lead to a second ribeye w/ cheese, and I’ve nearly never seen her more pleased with a taco. Like Orinoco (or should I say Red Atarantados?) (and like so many other places now), Atarantados brings you out a tray of many salsas BUT with the perhaps unique innovation of including little tortilla strips with it SO YOU CAN SAMPLE ALL THE SALSAS! Oh wait. I wrote that and then went down to look at my Atarantados pictures and realize … I don’t have one of the salsas? Ooops. Well. They had a black salsa with a citrusy taste, that one made an impression. Suddenly I lose my steam to go on and on about Atarantados. But I hope you have gathered that we liked our one final taco stop quite a lot and it left us wishing we weren’t leaving.

One more Moro milkshake w/ a churro or two before we call it a night one last time.

September 7: Our flight is in the early afternoon. There’s still time for a little more Mexico! One last walk to Rosetta for one last bag of pastries. And a picture of my in front of my favorite 2 houses for pictures in Roma.

Back to the hotel but no sitting around for me, I have one final mission: to go get myself a torta! So many Mexico trips and I have only gotten a torta (nearly my favorite way to eat Mexican!) on my 2017 and 2026 trips. Ridiculous. Got to Torteria los Gueros just as it opened and found myself making friends with the torta man before walking back to Stanza and passing Atarantados, ready for another day.

With a few more minutes on the clock, Liz and I go to Pushkin Garden to take pictures with the animals. Like we had in 2022. Interesting to compare those photos and see how things have been repainted. Nice to see they’re taking care of Pushkin. And then, finally, so sad, it’s time to say goodbye to Mexico.

Goodbye Hotel Stanza, you were the perfect hotel for our needs.

Goodbye Mexico City, you are the perfect city for our trips.

Goodbye Mexico City Temple, there in the distance on the left, perhaps we visit again next time sorry we didn’t make it this time.

Goodbye, Mexico, and thanks for the memories.